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Data-Empowered Journal
Data-Empowered Journaling
An easy way to get into the habit of journaling, while giving you the flexibility to track and analyze the things you care about.
I recently (in May 2019) decided to make journaling part of my daily routine. I've always reflected off and on, but it was infrequent and highly mood-based. There’s countless research showing how
regularly provides tons of
(this one’s a bit click-baity and goes overboard on the self-help vibe but has good info as well). After about a year of sticking with my habit, I have personally experienced the effects of these.
In the past 5 years, I’ve tried a variety of apps and tools to start up a journaling habit, but all of them either a) had a lot of other bloat that I didn’t need, b) didn’t have certain features I wanted to be incorporated into journaling, or c) didn’t give me enough flexibility to customize what kinds of data I wanted to track.
I created this Coda doc to help me build my journaling habit the way I wanted and track the data points that I felt were relevant. I’ve been loving this approach so far for these four reasons:
Simple
: you can fill out as much or as little as you want.
Contextualize
: Coda connects with my calendar and the weather to pull in relevant data to orient my mind to what I did when I go to reflect each day.
Flexible
: unlike pre-made apps, I can choose what data points I want to track and the kinds of analyses I want to project to inform my decisions.
Centralized
: I can organize all my thoughts in one place, including long-form reflections with the built-in folder and section organization, and keep track of important reflections and life trends.
Once you've gathered some data, you can even publish it into its own doc to have a fun monitor that is live updated with cross-doc (
). Happy to help create something like that if you're interested!
Have fun journaling 😄
Quickstart
1️⃣ Go to to setup your information.
2️⃣ Go to each day to fill out your journal entry.
Extra
3️⃣ Go to to review your collected data every once in a while.
4️⃣ Go to to look back at some random diary entries or the ones that you've flagged.
5️⃣ Go to to copy a template to do a long-form reflection whenever you feel like you have a lot to get out of your head or off your chest.
6️⃣ Go to to customize the data points you want to gather.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.